Manchester born Baritone Peter Braithwaite will be performing music banned by the Nazi’s at a special Holocaust Memorial Day at Manchester’s Jewish Museum.
The show‘Degenerate Music: Music Banned by the Nazis’, including Weimar cabaret, jazz, opera and protest songs will see the museum transformed into a nineteen thirties cabaret bar.
Devised by Peter, the performance is a critical song-based reconstruction of the infamous Entartete Musik (Degenerate Music) exhibition of 1938, intended by the Nazi government to alert the German public to “inferior and ultimately dangerous” forms of music, particularly jazz and Jewish music.
Through bravura interpretations of songs by Hanns Eisler and Bertolt Brecht; Kurt Weill and Lion Feuchtwanger; Friedrich Hollaender and Kurt Tucholsky; excerpts from Ernst Krenek’s jazz-opera, Jonny spielt auf, and atonal Schoenberg, the show not only gives a fascinating insight into the Berlin political cabarets of the Twenties and Thirties, but highlights the extraordinary range of musical styles unjustly branded as “degenerate”. The songs are interspersed with spoken excerpts from the Entartete Musik exhibition pamphlet (1938), whilst video projections created by James Symonds show scenes of everyday life during the days of the Weimar Republic.
Peter is establishing himself as an exciting young operatic talent. A graduate of London’s Royal College of Music, recent seasons have seen him make debuts with Glyndebourne, English Touring Opera, Opera Holland Park, Opera de Lyon, the Netherlands Reisopera and at the Edinburgh International Festival.
The concert takes place on the 27th January at 7.00pm
